Tim Worstall reviews Deepak Lal’s new book, Reviving the Invisible Hand: The Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century, and declares it A Liberal, Radical and Progressive Manifesto:
Lal effectively points out that just about every goal held dear by those who call themselves radicals and progressives is best reached by exactly the opposite policy prescriptions that they put forward. Indeed, we can go further and point out that the best methods of reaching those goals are in fact the truly liberal ones, those laid out all those decades ago by Adam Smith, David Hume and David Ricardo.Another way of putting this is that this book can and should be a rallying point for those of us who are indeed liberal, radical and progressive. Liberal in that we believe in the maximum amount of freedom consistent with the avoidance of anarchy (it was, after all, a British Liberal Prime Minister who campaigned on the idea that ‘The man who is governed best is the man who is governed least’); progressive in that we can make the world a better place; and radical in that this is not going to be achieved by tinkering at the margins.
The point:
The opposition to globalization seems to be driven by two things: one contemptible, the other merely mistaken. The contemptible one is the reaction of the various pressure groups in our own countries, bewailing the way in which “the market” will crush all cultures. This seems, in Lal’s view, to be driven by nothing more than hatred of people or Contemptus Mundi. The mistaken one is where there is a conflation between resisting the market itself (with the associated capitalism) and resisting American or European culture. It is possible to accept and benefit from one without importing the other — something that has not yet quite occurred to all? Organizing an economy along free market lines does not mean that Islamic states will have to allow topless sunbathing, alcohol or to abandon their cultural practices: Lal rightly points out that Japan is very much a capitalist society, but is still distinctively Japanese. All can become rich through trade without that having to mean that all become the same.
For example:
By the second half of the nineteenth century India had turned the tables on the Lancashire textiles industry. In the 1850s it had established a modern textile industry based on Indian entrepreneurship and capital and foreign technology. It began exporting cotton manufactures to Britain. The Lancashire cotton interests lobbied the British-Indian government to “apply British factory legislation en bloc to India so as to neutralize the ‘unfair’ advantages which the Indian mill-industry was enjoying because of the large scale employment of child labor and long hours of work”.
Worstall’s reaction:
That worked well, did it not? — making India so, so much richer. Remember this next time you hear the AFL or CIO calling for international labor standards: it’s pure protectionism.